The actor posted a video message on Tuesday decrying recent reports of dog culling in Lahore. She asked why court orders against the practice were being disregarded and what gave authorities the right to kill innocent animals.

The actor started by acknowledging the problem of stray dogs biting people was present, but asserted this was because authorities had failed to apply the trap, neuter, vaccinate, release (TNVR) method, which she said was the humane way to control stray animal populations.

Lamenting that they had instead resorted to shooting dogs and poisoning them, Sarhadi asked why humans felt it was okay to exploit and abuse nature. “Why do they think they have a right to use living things? Donkeys are used for work, dogs are killed at will, horses have been used for work, elephants are used for pleasure. Zoos have been built where animals are not cared for properly; they are simply taken out of their habitats and imprisoned.”

Humans are the “cruelest” of all animals, the actor said. She contended that the increase in aggression among stray animals was also a result of human activities. “They’ve been abused and pelted with stones all their lives, they are just defending themselves.”

Sarhadi said she had been to areas in Pakistan where treating animals with kindness was part of the local culture and as a result humans and animals co-existed peacefully.

The actor said she couldn’t understand why TNVR protocols were not implemented, musing that perhaps it was cheaper to shoot dogs so they tried to save a penny or two.

She insisted people were cruel to dogs simply because it was within their power. “When a child is murdered by a man, a preacher, a teacher, a father or an uncle — which happens often, more so [than dogs mauling kids] — nobody goes to kill all fathers, uncles and teachers. But we will kill all the dogs. Why? Because we can!”

Sarhadi said she applauds each and every volunteer, shelter and activist fighting for the animals who couldn’t fight for themselves. She said they would have to continue their fight — as would she — if attitudes like this continued.

Reports and eye-witness accounts from Lahore say a mass culling campaign is underway, led by the Metropolitan Corporation Lahore (MCL), despite orders by the Lahore High Court to implement the Punjab Animal Birth Control Policy, 2021. The policy calls for vaccination and humane population control.

The MCL denies these reports, with Chief Metropolitan Officer Shahid Kathia telling Dawn his teams were “capturing hundreds of dogs” on a daily basis, vaccinating them and releasing them outside the city. He insisted his men were not killing any dogs.

The claims of getting dogs vaccinated were challenged by the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, which said no animals had been brought there for vaccination. This all comes as videos of dog carcasses being left on city streets spread on social media.

Quoting local newspaper Österreich, The Times of Israel reported two people were removed from the venue over the chants, which could be heard in the show’s live broadcast. Accounts on social media posted footage from the broadcast with audible chants.

The incident follows protests in Vienna, including one where demonstrators placed coffins in the city centre. At the site, 67-year-old Karin Spindlberger told AFP, “Israel has become an aggressor.” She said music brings people together, “but not in this way”.

Protests planned throughout the week leading up to the final on Saturday are expected to draw around 3,000 people to the streets.

Eurovision director Martin Green said the protests and competition taking place simultaneously showed people could have differing opinions on something and coexist. “It is a profoundly good sign of a democracy where you can have this show happening on one side of the city and a protest happening on the other side and they can both coexist. Maybe the world can learn from that,” he said.

This year’s Israeli participation is a lot less politically charged than last year’s, when the country sent Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the October 7, 2023 attack that started Israel’s devastating war on Gaza.

This year’s participant, Bettan, has qualified for the final based on a cumulative score of jury and public votes. He is joined by acts from Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Serbia and Sweden.

Ten more performers will qualify in the second semi-final on Thursday out of this year’s 35 participants — the lowest in 13 years. Hosts Austria, the UK, France, Germany and Italy also have guaranteed spots in the final.

Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain have all boycotted the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.

Public broadcasters Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have gone so far as to announce they will not be airing Eurovision at all, with Slovenian RTV opting to run the thematic programme Voices of Palestine instead.

Israel meanwhile continues killing people in Gaza despite a ceasefire having been in place since October. Three more were killed on Sunday, with the total death toll from Israeli military actions standing at over 72,500.

There were big cars, sunglasses, clunky jewellery and a whole lot of rap as contestants were seen performing on stage and dissing their adversaries in rap battles.

On Sunday, the programme’s season promo dropped, revealing it will begin airing from May 24 on Pixel Entertainment’s YouTube channel. This is a delay from an earlier timeline that would have had the show released around Eidul Fitr.

The show will have 12 up and coming rappers battling for the title of Rap Icon over the course of 10 episodes, executive producer Rizwan Siddiqui told Images in December. He said the goal was to “find the next Talha Anjum or next Bohemia”.

Contestants will have to take part in a number of rap-related challenges based around different themes and styles. Many of them will be eliminated as the show goes on, with the best making it into a “grand finale”.

While this is the first such show in Pakistan, the idea of mixing rap and reality TV isn’t new. The Rap Game ran in the US for five seasons between 2016 and 2019. Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow saw big names such as Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, DJ Khaled and Ludacris appear as judges.

Reality TV as a whole seemed to be having a revival in Pakistan in the last couple of years with shows like Masterchef and Shark Tank getting local adaptations. Pakistan Idol was also revived, but faces uncertainty with its finale indefinitely postponed in light of “regional tensions rising and calls for national austerity”.

There is still hope though, as Pakistan’s Got Talent may still be on the cards after Rap Icon.

The name change was published in The Lancet medical journal and announced at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague on Tuesday. It came after 14 years of collaboration between international societies and patient groups.

According to the medical journal, PCOS has primarily been perceived as a gynaecological or ovarian disorder, however, research has shown that it is underpinned by endocrine disturbances in insulin, androgens, and neuroendocrine and ovarian hormones.

“The broad clinical features of the condition are not captured in its current name, as although arrested follicular development is common, pathological ovarian cysts are not increased. These factors delay diagnosis — with up to 70pc of affected individuals remaining undiagnosed — and also contribute to widespread knowledge gaps and patient dissatisfaction.”

The Guardian reported that the renaming was spearheaded by endocrinologist Prof Helena Teede, director of Melbourne’s Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation. Experts, including Teede, have said the misleading nature of the term “polycystic” in PCOS contributed to delayed diagnosis and inadequate medical care.

Announcing the new name at the European Congress of Endocrinology, Teede said the term PCOS didn’t capture the “multi-system burden that people with this condition have suffered”, and instead “directs attention to only one organ”.

It is hoped that the new term — PMOS — will better reflect the condition’s complex nature, as it affects not only the reproductive system but also the metabolism and the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“AI is here. And so to fight it is to, in a ​sense, to fight something that is a battle that we will lose. So to ​find ways in which we can work with it is a more valuable ⁠path to take,” said Moore.

The US actor, who received her first Oscar nomination for ​body horror The Substance after its Cannes premiere in 2024, is returning to the festival this year ​as one of nine members of the jury who will hand out the Palme d’Or top prize on May 23.

“Are we doing enough to protect ourselves? I don’t know,” added Moore, speaking to journalists. “And so my inclination ​would be to say probably not.”

The festival does not allow generative AI in competition, but ​the conversation about the technology’s role in filmmaking has been a dominant theme at the festival that positions ‌itself ⁠as a gatekeeper of what qualifies as cinema.

First Korean Jury president

Park Chan-wook, the first Korean filmmaker to lead the jury, reflected on how Korea has become a cinema industry powerhouse since he brought his thriller Oldboy to Cannes in 2004.

“Korea is no longer at the outskirts of the ​global cinematic industry,” he ​said, speaking through a ⁠translator.

“The reason behind it isn’t only because Korean film did very well and made it to the centre of the industry. It’s because ​the centre of the global film industry itself has expanded,” he said.

That ​made it ⁠possible for him to be named jury president, said Park, adding that he promised not to be biased towards the Korean entry, Na Hong‑jin’s Hope.

Comparing the 22 competition films and ranking them in first, ⁠second ​and third place might feel like a “meaningless” act, he ​said.

“But that’s also where the value of that lies, because it’s an opportunity to tell everyone and to beg everyone ​to please watch these films.”

In a lengthy note posted on Instagram on Tuesday, the actor said people who had no “knowledge or insight” into the craft were on YouTube reviewing dramas.

Feroze said it’s “easy to criticise and pass comments” without understanding the hard work that goes into such projects and without knowing the value artists bring.

“I simply want to say that every artist, actor, writer, and creator deserves respect and encouragement,” the actor wrote.

He also made it clear that he was not against critique from people who knew what they were talking about. “Constructive criticism is always welcome, but negativity without understanding can deeply affect people who work day and night for their art.”

Feroze asked his own fans to lend their support to artists who faced such harsh and unfair judgement and show them the kindness and positivity everyone needs and deserves.

The actor thanked everyone for paying attention to what was “just a little note from my heart.”

Feroze isn’t the first one to say this and he likely won’t be the last either. Mahira Khan also asked viewers of her drama 2021 Hum Kahan Key Sachey Thay — her first after a five-year hiatus — to not jump the gun and wait for the show to finish before dragging it through the dirt.

Actor Aagha Ali also felt some criticism towards the drama Main Manto Nahi Hoon was a bit excessive, especially when it came to elements like sets and wardrobes.

The drama’s star, Humayun Saeed, said he didn’t take criticism of the show too seriously. However, some of the critique Ali and Saeed were talking about came from senior actors such as Atiqa Odho and Marina Khan, who definitely are masters of their craft and speak from years of industry experience.

In a style of censure usually reserved for women and their choices, Mustafa received intense public backlash for wearing a pair of shorts and sitting with his legs crossed.

The actor was called “shameless”, “vulgar” and all sorts of other names people used most recently to talk about fellow actor Dananeer Mobeen and sheer tights she wore under a skirt.

Mishi Khan, the actor known more for her social media commentary than her acting, even chided him for showcasing his “beautiful hairy legs”. She said different places had different dress codes and it wasn’t appropriate for male celebrities to be wearing shorts during interviews. “You’re not at some beach party,” she remarked.

She also talked about how women face so much more flak for these things and asked why everyone who treated Mobeen’s clothes like the end of the world just last week was silent today.

She wasn’t alone in this criticism — the internet was awash with people who were offended by Mustafa’s clothes for one reason or the other. From the hypocrisy of men being allowed to wear shorts when women were criticised for it relentlessly to his clothes being inappropriate for an interview, a lot was said.

However, it seems Mustafa knew this was going to happen and simply did not care enough about the haters. In the interview, he made a point about double standards in Pakistani society, where some things are kosher in foreign films but Pakistani filmmakers face backlash for doing them.

He said Nora Fatehi and her dances were hugely popular in Pakistan, but if Mehwish Hayat — his Zombeid co-star who was sitting next to him — danced in Na Maloom Afraad, it was suddenly not okay.

This is when he got to his shorts and asked what the big deal was if he did wear them. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been wearing them since I was a child, they’re just shorts. What’s the matter?”

He said he had worn shorts in school all the way till sixth grade and continues to wear them for activities like badminton and cricket. The actor said you could go out on an evening stroll and see 10 people also wearing shorts, so it was unclear to him what the issue was.

When host Aamna Isani asked if he wore the shorts to promote his own clothing line, he retorted quickly. “I don’t give a s**t, that’s why I wear them. Why is everyone telling me what to wear and what not to wear?”

He then promptly used the opportunity to promote his clothing business.

The sad reality is that Mustafa is right. Society has a habit of linking clothes to morals and then policing them, for men and especially for women. While Mustafa is wondering why everyone is telling him what to wear, we’re wondering how this is one of the first male actors in the country who’s been policed for their clothes, especially given that female actors are policed nonstop.

Perhaps the solution is just to let everyone wear and do what they want…

But that’s okay. This adaptation of Michael’s life — directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equaliser), written by John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator), and produced by Graham King (Bohemian Rhapsody, The Departed) — is a perfect recap-cum-balancing act.

A film that’s neither ‘Dangerous’ when it comes to pushing narrative boundaries, nor ‘Bad’ when it comes to storytelling, nor a ‘Thriller’ when it comes to keeping you hooked on unexpected plot turns, nor just ‘Black or White’. It gives you just enough “best of” moments to keep you engaged, but plays it safe by toning down the creativity.

Michael is a harmless, good enough film about a musical icon who didn’t care to be just ‘good enough’

For the most part, the way Fuqua, Logan and King tell the story suggests that their priority is to present the most dramatic, mellow and generally palatable representation of Michael’s life. It is a straightforward account of what people already know, presented in a way where the drama doesn’t shatter the ceiling, or introduce the kind of human frailty and fallibility that might sully Michael Jackson’s image.

Like I said earlier, it is a balancing act — one that only delves into the first half of the pop icon’s life; a story about a young man freeing himself from his father’s shackles. It is a hard sell, let me tell you, because the angle is all bark and no bite.

In 1966, we see Michael as a young prodigy (Juliano Krue Valdi) whose ambition is kept in check by his dad, Joseph ‘Joe’ Jackson (Colman Domingo). Joe, a steelworker from Gary, Indiana, is an enterprising, hard man who wants his children, The Jackson 5, to be a perfect music band. That means late-night rehearsals on school nights without a peep. When Michael, the shining star of the group, objects, he gets the belt.

The young Michael — though he loves his family — bides his time and, within two years, his charisma and talent lands the band at Motown Records, the biggest label for African American artists. Success comes quickly, and the family quickly moves from their small house to a mansion.

Michael grows up, now played by his real-life nephew, Jaafar Jackson, who blurs the lines between sincerity and parody with a committed performance. We see his quirks (he calls his pet giraffe, llama and his chimp, Bubbles, his friends), some human depth (he visits terminally ill children in hospital wards), his yearnings (he fancies the infantile escape from reality that Peter Pan represents), his technical and creative ambition, and his soft, diabolical side.

We see his ‘Smooth Criminal’ ways when he uses his new record label power to fire his dad. By the time the film nears its two-hour runtime, one wonders how it will culminate Michael’s journey, when there is just so much left to tell.

You won’t like the answer: with an ending card that reads, “His story continues.”

One film, in this case, isn’t enough. The better, darker parts of Michael’s life are definitely just around the bend in a sequel that has already been greenlit. Perhaps that one will have the guts to not be this sterile or merely stick to the surface.

Despite the lack of daring storytelling-wise, the production is top-notch, and the songs force you to involuntarily swing back and forth in your seat, but that goes without saying — this is a harmless, good enough film for a man who didn’t care to be just “good enough.”

Released by HKC and Universal, Michael is, unsurprisingly and perhaps amusingly — given the studio-rated ‘U’ (Universal) — suitable for audiences of all ages.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, May 10th, 2026

The trailer for the film — which claims to be Pakistan’s first zombie thriller — dropped on Monday, showing a mix of guts, gore and some good old Pakistani humour.

From what we can decipher, the movie is set in Karachi, with Mustafa shown as a mixed martial artist and Hayat as his romantic interest. A virus outbreak starts at the venue of one of Mustafa’s cage matches — on the night before Eid no less — with Hayat in attendance.

The pair along with a number of hapless civilians must then try to survive until help is sent by authorities who initially refuse to believe any of it is even real — there’s a scene where a visibly annoyed cop hears about it and exclaims “Zumbees? Everyone’s up for a joke on Chand Raat”.

The government does get involved later and what follows can only be described as a mashup of some classic 80s action movies.

Mustafa, dressed in a sleeveless tank top with a bandana tied around his head — looking oddly like Sylvester Stallone in First Blood — punches, kicks and otherwise battles white-eyed brain-eaters.

There’s a scene where he looks at Hayat and repeats Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic line from the 1984 sci-fi thriller The Terminator — you know the line. In another scene, he can be seen leaping off a roof like Bruce Willis in everyone’s favourite 80s holiday movie Die Hard — but, y’know, with zombies.

The film doesn’t appear to be for the squeamish or the weak of heart, but for anyone who can handle the graphic violence, it will hit theatres globally in just over a couple of weeks on the first day of Eid.

For the uninitiated, the drama centres around Zeba, who is stuck in a toxic marriage for over 20 years and has four children (how two people who can’t stand each other end up having four kids is a whole other drama for another day). The early episodes are set in the ’80s, if not the ’90s, before we’re suddenly brought to the present — where the kids are all grown up.

Warning: Spoilers ahead as this piece is mainly about the last two episodes.

When Zeba finally chooses to leave Jami (after what feels like an eternity), it should be a triumphant moment. Instead, you mostly just think: it’s about time. To give credit where it’s due, Sanam Saeed’s brilliant and nuanced performance makes you believe in her and root for her, even when the script falters. Such as when secures her khula — a major victory — around that time, almost on cue, Jami 2 (or is he Jami 1?) appears and proposes — while she’s still in iddat.

The good part is that for once, her children — especially her son — and even her mother and siblings urge her to consider the proposal. Zeba, however, stands her ground and says no, making it clear she refuses to leap into another marriage where she must answer to someone else. We’re mercifully spared the tired “how can a woman remarry?” clichés, which is a breath of fresh air. In fact, the fact that her remarriage is treated relatively normally says a lot about how audience attitudes towards divorced women remarrying are slowly changing. So far, so good.

But then, in what feels like the blink of an eye — after just one encounter with Jami 2’s late wife’s mother, whose acting is so awful that you’d expect the opposite effect — Zeba is suddenly persuaded to say qabool hai, qabool hai, qabool hai.

It’s a letdown, because this was the moment the story needed to pause and breathe. Zeba deserved time to reflect, to hesitate, to truly consider what a second marriage meant after all she’d endured. Instead, decades of pain are swept aside in a single scene. 

It feels less like a genuine and well-thought-out decision and more like the drama just needed her to say yes so it could quickly move on to the next wedding. (More on that later.)

Ultimately, Zeba’s journey, which should have been given the most importance, gets diluted in the rush to wrap everything else up.  

The same hurried logic hits Saif and Varda’s storyline. Varda, sulking at her mother’s house, suddenly has an epiphany because her mother leaves her a lone slice of bread to eat and heads out to dinner. That’s all it takes for Varda to realise how cherished she was by her husband and his family — so she returns to her hubby’s and indulges in sasu maa’s dinner. (Foodpanda, anyone?) 

Back to Zeba — she remarries, and suddenly her beloved son Subuk decides he can now marry Daneer, despite all his earlier detailed and lengthy protests about being poor and unable to provide for some of her ‘isstatus’. What changed? Did he just assume his new daddy-ji would foot their bills? And while we’re on that note, isn’t Gen Z supposedly delaying marriage and concentrating on themselves? Kafeel clearly didn’t get that memo!

Interestingly, writer Umera Ahmed later clarified that the original time lapse in the script was actually 27 years, with the children meant to be fully grown adults. According to her, casting changes compressed the timeline, which explains why viewers were left wondering whether the drama was marrying off people who still looked like teenagers.

What’s also missing is any reaction from Jami 1 — her now ex-husband. And honestly, after all his constant comments about how she’d end up alone, miserable, or “out on the streets” without him, the audience earned the right to watch him suffer a little.

We deserved at least one scene of him properly seething at the sight — or at least the thought — of Zeba happily remarried and moving on without him. Instead, the drama skips over his reaction completely, which is ridiculous given that he was ever present in all the previous episodes.

Ultimately, Kafeel falls into the same trap many Pakistani dramas do: dragging on for months, only to rush through the resolution at record speed. Characters spend episode after episode crying, arguing and suffering, but when the emotional payoff finally arrives, it’s squeezed into a hurried finale.

China is facing a demographic crisis after its birth rate halved over the past decade and in response, authorities have heavily promoted traditional family structures.

“My mother has two ‘husbands’, one is my dad, the other is seen twice a year,” read a Friday post by consumer electronics firm OPPO on social media platform Weibo.

The second “husband” seemingly referred to the woman’s favourite celebrity. Swiftly removed, the advert was part of a campaign aiming to show a more diverse image of modern mothers, including those who enjoy “celebrity chasing”, the company said in a statement on Friday. But taking the post down was not enough to stop a swell of official criticism over the weekend.

“Two husbands is not funny at all,” a provincial propaganda department said in a statement on Sunday.

Officials from eastern Zhejiang province warned brands against riling up people’s emotions to win customers, despite a temptation to appeal to younger buyers.

“Lacking boundaries will lead to mistaking offence for creativity,” the statement said.

Trade group China Advertising Association also chided brands for crossing moral boundaries on Sunday, local media reported.

On Monday OPPO said it had “severely punished” a senior vice president and other marketing managers for “ignoring the bottom line of mainstream societal values”.

Originally published in Dawn, May 12th, 2026

Cover photo: OPPO

The three countries, along with the Nether­lands and Iceland, pulled out of this year’s event in Vienna, which kicks off on Tuesday and culminates in Saturday’s grand final.

Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip prompted the five countries to withdraw from the world’s biggest live televised music event — with Eurovision director Martin Green vowing to do “anything in our power to find a pathway back” for them.

Suspicions were also raised that the public televoting system was being manipulated to boost Israel at Eurovision 2025 in Basel, Switzerland. Furthermore, some broadcasters voiced concerns about media freedom, with Israel preventing their journalists from accessing Gaza.

“Instead of the Eurovision circus, the national television programme will be coloured by the thematic programme series Voices of Palestine,” Slovenian broadcaster RTV said.

Ireland are joint-record seven-time Eurovision winners, but on Saturday, RTE will be showing a Eurovision-themed episode of the popular 1990s Irish-based sitcom Father Ted instead. Spain’s RTVE will run its own musical special, The House of Music. Public service broadcasters in the Netherlands and Iceland will screen the competition, despite neither taking part.

Only 35 countries will take part in Eurovision this year — the fewest since entry was expanded in 2004 — following the five withdrawals. As to whether those countries could return, Eurovision chief Green said: “We’ve got five members of our family missing this year. We miss them and we love them and we hope they come back.

Originally published in Dawn, May 12th, 2026

Fiction writers often peel back the layers of their characters’ histories to make them more three-dimensional, realistic and intriguing. This technique opens a doorway into their hidden emotional lives and even allows them an opportunity to identify and address their traumas.

Poet, publisher and novelist Safinah Danish Elahi’s oeuvre also harbours a preoccupation with the past. However, her three novels don’t employ the motif in a clichéd manner, where scandalous revelations about characters overshadow their emotional and spiritual growth. Instead, turning the clock back to a bygone era serves as a clarion call, urging people to recognise their responsibilities to themselves and others.

In Eye on the Prize, fragile bonds remain intact because the characters choose to overlook an adolescent mistake in order to protect those who are vulnerable. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon explores the lingering echoes of a traumatic childhood tragedy in the life of two unlikely friends. As they deal with their dilemmas, the protagonists learn a valuable lesson about empathy and humanity.

Across time and space, four friends discover that the past is not something left behind — but something that shapes the present

Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light is built on a similar template, insofar as it offers yet another captivating exploration of how the past seeps into the present. Like her previous fictional offerings, Elahi’s third novel places the turmoil of a troubled girl at its epicentre.

Above all, this new work, like The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, adopts a multi-character perspective. However, each character’s viewpoint is filtered through a detached third-person voice, rather than the immersive first-person perspective employed in Elahi’s sophomore novel. This stylistic shift constructs a barrier between the characters and readers, thereby lending an aura of mystery to the narrative.

A quick glance at the back cover text promises a poignant tale about adolescent friendships that evolve as time, distance and dark secrets threaten old affinities. The plot is deceptively simple yet layered. Saira, Ashar, Usman and Areen once lived in Karachi, the city of their teenage triumphs, rebellions and emotional catastrophes. Now, three of them have fashioned new homes for themselves in Australia and the US, and inhabit different spheres largely detached from their roots. Nevertheless, their destinies remain inextricably linked to Karachi because of a secret that scars all of them, especially Areen.

Years later, when Karachi-based Saira receives an unsettling message from Areen — now an artist in New York — she reaches out to Ashar and Usman to enlist them in yet another attempt to ensure their friend’s well-being. Fuelled by habit, or a desire to protect their struggling companion, Saira, Usman and Ashar slip back into their predefined and well-rehearsed roles. It does not take them long to realise that the thrills and terrors of the past run the risk of obstructing the dynamics of the present, leading all four of them to revive their forgotten, transgressive selves.

The twists and turns of Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light cannot be delineated without revealing spoilers. The strength of Elahi’s narrative lies in its ability to deviate from the predictable path and employ numerous methods to draw readers into this suspenseful work. The narrative is sculpted as a mosaic, and readers are encouraged to piece together a sea of fragments into a cohesive whole. Instead of following a linear trajectory, the story alternates between past and present, specifically 2008 and 2022.

The reader’s curiosity is initially sparked by a succinct prologue, in which ravenous flames lick every corner of a room and reduce it to ashes. As the “flames glow bright orange like the sun in its prime”, fear instantly finds residence in the room. Through this opening sequence, readers gain an inkling of the personal and emotional degradation that haunts the pages of Elahi’s novel.

The sinister undertone of Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light is reinforced by an omniscient yet reserved narrator. Resembling a strategic poker player, the all-knowing, wily narrator conceals their hand and allows key information to fall gradually into the reader’s lap. These techniques transform the novel into an intricate puzzle for readers to solve.

The plot is deceptively simple yet layered. Saira, Ashar, Usman and Areen once lived in Karachi, the city of their teenage triumphs, rebellions and emotional catastrophes. Now, three of them have fashioned new homes for themselves in Australia and the US, and inhabit different spheres largely detached from their roots. Nevertheless, their destinies remain inextricably linked to Karachi because of a secret that scars all of them, especially Areen.

The centrepiece of Elahi’s third novel is the final section, which skilfully employs the second-person perspective to reveal the fragility of Areen’s fractured mind. This proves to be an effective technique, as it achieves a level of intimacy and discomfort that a first-person account might not have conveyed.

Driven by quiet but chaotic restraint, the final section begins to resemble the pages of an emotionally disturbed artist’s diary. The peculiar darkness of Areen’s mind is mirrored in the urgent, affecting prose, which reminds readers of the importance of therapy in addressing the burdens of unresolved traumas.

Elahi’s novels have sought to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health. Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light consolidates this commitment by urging us to prioritise our own psychological well-being while also recognising the plight of those who must carry the debilitating weight of emotional trauma.

Elahi ought to be commended for the profoundly original title of her new novel that, incidentally, echoes her characters’ emotional trajectory. Throughout the novel, the four friends are haunted by the shadows of the past, which they pursue and seek to escape in equal measure.

Ashar struggles to cope with a painful history of grief. Saira is driven by the muscle memory of empathy she once exercised as a silent witness to Areen’s traumatic experiences during their teenage years. Usman, who has escaped and created some semblance of a stable future for himself, is still guided by the pleasant memories of someone he once abandoned. Areen carries the trauma of an abusive childhood, compounded by the guilt of the actions she took to shield herself from harm. The group gradually learns to deal with the futility of their individual pursuits, except for Areen, who plunges deeper into an emotional vortex.

Beyond its focus on the psychological journey of its cast of characters, Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light captures the complexities of Pakistani expatriate life without relying on stereotypical assumptions. Furthermore, the novel carries faint echoes of Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, albeit without its political dimensions.

Stripped of this layer, Elahi’s new work emerges as a more personal glimpse into the lives of ordinary Karachiites grappling with childhood trauma, and their complex relationship with home amid the pressures of globalisation.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 10th, 2026

The lawsuit alleges that Samsung featured a copyrighted ​image of the pop star on the front of cardboard boxes containing ​televisions for retail sale, enabling the company to benefit from what seemed ⁠like her endorsement of the product.

The image alleged to have been used ​on the TV boxes is titled “Dua Lipa — Backstage at Austin City Limits, 2024,“ and ​Lipa is the owner of all rights, title and interest in the image, the lawsuit said. The suit was filed on Friday in the California federal court.

A spokesperson for Samsung Electronics declined ​to comment, saying it was unable to comment on pending litigation, while ​Lipa’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.

Besides copyright and ‌trademark ⁠infringement, Lipa has accused Samsung Electronics of breaching publicity rights.

Her lawyers have attached screenshots of social media postings and comments in the filing claiming that the pop star’s image on the front of the boxes pushed potential customers to purchase the ​product. One of ​these screenshots shows ⁠a fan commenting that they would get the TV “just because Dua is on it.”

The ‘Levitating’ singer became aware of Samsung’s alleged ​infringement in June last year and demanded that Samsung stop using ​her ⁠image, but the electronics manufacturer repeatedly refused to do so, her lawyers said.

Samsung’s alleged unauthorised use of Lipa’s image has “caused and continues to cause dilution” of the pop star’s “brand identity ⁠and ​commercial goodwill by falsely conveying to the consuming ​public that she approves of and endorses” the products in question, they added.

Cover via Dua Lipa/Instagram

The BBC had cited concerns over partiality when declining to broadcast the documentary. It was later aired by Channel 4. The documentary, directed by Karim Shah, was nominated in the Current Affairs and Director: Factual categories. 

According to Al Jazeera, while accepting the award, executive producer Ben de Pear thanked the journalists behind the film and then addressed the BBC. “Finally, just a question for the BBC: Given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?”

Journalist and presenter Ramita Navai also criticised the BBC during her speech, citing findings from the documentary’s investigation into attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, according to the publication. “These are the findings of our investigation that the BBC paid for but refused to show,” she said. “But we refuse to be silenced and censored. We thank Channel 4 for showing this film.”

According to The Telegraph, the BBC chose not to air Navai’s speech in full and instead presented a “carefully edited version which removed her claims about Israel’s actions”. The Bafta awards are broadcast on BBC One after a delay of two hours.

The BBC’s decision not to broadcast Gaza: Doctors Under Attack came after it faced criticism for another documentary it aired narrated by a young Palestinian boy who was the son of a Hamas official. His father’s profession was not disclosed in the documentary.

Speaking backstage after their win, executive producer de Pear praised Gazan journalists Jaber Badwan and Osana Al Ashi, who contributed footage for the documentary. He said the team “woke up every day wondering if the two journalists on the ground were still alive”.

Cover: Screen grab via BBC

“The Legend of Maula Jatt has broken into one of the most exclusive film quotas in the world — the first Pakistani film ever to do so,” he wrote on X. The film will be in cinemas across the country from May 21.

Lashari dubbed this “a huge moment for Pakistani cinema and a new door opening for our stories on the world stage”.

He also shared a film poster in Mandarin and a dubbed version of the trailer.

The film stars Fawad and Mahira, Humaima Malick, Hamza Ali Abbasi, Gohar Rasheed, Faris Shafi and Ali Azmat, and is a reboot of the 1979 cult classic Maula Jatt, reimagining Punjab’s own superhero for a world audience.

The movie made Rs1 billion at the domestic box office and $10 million at the worldwide box office, as of January 2023, making it one of, if not the highest performing Pakistani films ever.

In 2024, the film was supposed to release in India, but did not due to opposition from hardline nationalist parties. Had it released in India, The Legend of Maula Jatt would have been the first Pakistani movie in Indian cinemas in over a decade, after Shoaib Mansoor’s 2011 Bol.

Despite the restrictions, many important subjects of women’s rights were highlighted, including the right to bodily autonomy — the march’s now-signature slogan “Mera jism, meri marzi (My body, my choice)” was raised loudly, proudly and frequently — freedom of movement and marital rape.

Marital rape was especially significant to the organisers this year in light of the death of Shanti, a 19-year-old newlywed from Lyari whose succumbed to her injuries in July after her husband allegedly subjected her to brutal sexual violence just two days after their wedding.

Shanti’s bari (a collection of wedding gifts given by the groom’s family) was laid out on a white sheet at the venue. It was a chilling reminder of her hopes, dreams and a life lost too soon.

Speakers at the march, including Shanti’s sister-in-law who gave a rousing speech in Sindhi, called for the cancellation of bail granted to Dr Rauf Shaikh. The doctor told the victim’s father-in-law he could treat her when staff at Karachi’s Civil Hospital said the nature of the injuries demanded police involvement.

Dr Shaikh is accused of providing improper care to Shanti, with a report from the Women’s Action Forum saying she may have survived had she been treated properly. He was granted bail by the Sindh High Court on January 26.

The right to hold the protest itself was a hot topic, with veteran artist and women’s rights activist Sheema Kermani saying nothing could stop women from exercising their “constitutional right” to protest.

Speaking to Images after the event, she described her own experience being taken into police custody outside Karachi Press Club. “Male policemen forcefully hit my car. They forced the backdoor open and sat inside.” She said this act was actually illegal as opposed to what she was arrested for — attending a pre-arranged press conference.

She described the restrictions placed on the protest as “absolutely nonsensical”. “We resisted Ziaul Haq who told us how to dress, wear this and don’t wear that, we won’t take it from a democratic government.”

The march had a number of performances, including a rap, a semi-classical kathak dance and a rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s resistance anthem ‘Hum Dekhenge’. Maha Ali Kazmi, who performed kathak on stage, said she marched — and performed — to raise awareness, not just among men, but also women who didn’t know what their rights are, who had been conditioned to accept abuse.

She said it was okay and important to talk about these things, despite society telling women not to. “It’s a criminal offence to harass somebody. Domestic violence is a criminal offence, rape is a criminal offence, marital rape is a criminal offence, but talking about our experiences is not a crime.”

One new feature was the Misogynist of the Year awards, a collection of men nominated by the public who had been chosen as representation of all that is wrong with Pakistani men. The honourees included Maulana Fazlur Rehman, writer Khalilur Rehman Qamar, actors Danish Taimoor and Ahmed Ali Butt and podcast host Sahil Adeem.

Huda, who organises marches in solidarity with the people of Palestine, said she was attending her first Aurat March this year to honour all the women before her who couldn’t demand their rights like this. “From my grandmother and my mother’s time, there’s no one who’s been speaking for these things. Everyone’s speaking at home, but nobody is taking it [out onto the] roads, because, as they say, aurton ki izzat sarkon pe nhi aani chahiye (women’s respect doesn’t belong on roads).”

Cherona, a volunteer participating in her third march this year, said she saw the annual event as an entry point for women into politics. “I think this is a great stepping stone for women to get into the political space.”

She said the movement wasn’t just about the annual protest march and its team tries to inform policymaking on women’s issues. The Aurat March is also involved in welfare activities for women in underdeveloped areas and organises free medical camps for women who need them.

She said the march was a safe space for all genders and one for men to interact with women in a way that is civil and non-threatening. She said she was thankful to the police for keeping the march safe and running smoothly.

Police presence at the march was initially scattered, with the odd policeman seen brandishing a baton at the park’s perimeter to scare away disruptive onlookers. When the procession began moving from its gathering point at Beach View Park to Seaview, female police officers escorted the march all the way. Additional mounted units joined the rally at the beach.

Cover via Shakeel Adil/White Star

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of relaying information which allows it to only be viewed by the sending and receiving devices.

The feature was touted as the ‘gold standard’ in privacy by Meta, but received opposition from law enforcement and groups advocating for the protection of children online.

Meta began rolling E2EE out on Facebook in 2019 and completed the process in 2023; it remains the default method of messaging on the platform. It was introduced as an optional feature on Instagram, which appears to be what led to its downfall as the company said it was being rolled back due to underutilisation.

Another messaging platform owned by Meta, WhatsApp, also uses E2EE as its method of data transmission. Apps like Signal, iMessage and Google Messages also use the advanced security protocol as their default setting, while Telegram has it as an optional service.

Meta did not publicly announce the termination of the feature, choosing instead to quietly update the app’s terms and conditions in March.

“End‑to‑end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026. If you have chats affected by this change, you will see instructions on how to download any media or messages you may wish to keep,” the company said just two weeks after competitor TikTok said it had no plans to introduce the feature.

“We are really pleased,” said Rani Govender from the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to the BBC. She added E2EE “can allow perpetrators to evade detection, enabling the grooming and abuse of children to go unseen”.

Maya Thomas, a privacy campaigner, said her team saw the move as a step backwards and they were “concerned that Meta may be caving to government pressure“.

“Whoever I will be with in the future, I also don’t want them to get uncomfortable because of all of this… things circulating, going around,” the actor said.

Aside from future concerns, she said such things affected her family life in the present too. “It does make me uncomfortable, because my family starts getting affected quite a lot. They ask me, ‘Beta, why are they saying this?’ My parents are simple people.”

Mobeen did clarify that this had less to do with her work and more with what people were saying, adding that her parents enjoyed watching her latest romantic drama, Meem se Mohabbat, with Ahad Raza Mir.

The actor said they had always been ‘scared’ about her line of work and the perception of the media industry for people on the outside looking in was “skewed”, calling it a “harsh reality”. She said her family had no ties to the media at all before she joined the field and that made her parents fear for her from the beginning.

Mobeen said she understands their concerns more as she grows older, becoming protective of girls who have entered the industry after her. “If I am feeling this at my age, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my parents, sending me into the industry from the bubble they had built.”

Her co-stars, however, were cooperative and supportive, so rumours on the internet never made things awkward on set. She said some even approached the issue with banter and light-hearted humour, so it’s never a problem for her professionally.

She said she had grown up a lot in the last five years and that she would be “unrecognisable” to her younger self. She also faced a lot of “scrutiny” from the public during this time, which she said affected her to some degree. “I have no shame in admitting that… I am not made of metal,” she said.

That scrutiny reared its head recently when the actor was in London to promote her film Mera Lyari and posted a picture of herself wearing skin-tone leggings — earning the ire of fans.

Mobeen said that particular incident didn’t hit her too hard because it was just so ridiculous. She said she was “dying from the cold” and wore tights to keep warm. “What’s the big deal, why is this in headlines?” she asked.

She also questioned society’s obsession with policing women’s morals. “Men have shirtless photoshoots, nobody bats an eye, but they dragged me over fleece leggings like I’d committed some grave sin. I just don’t understand why this is treated like an issue of ‘respect’.”

Undeterred and always willing to make a fashion statement, the actor wore a special top for the interview, with a deep meaning behind it.

Made using recycled cigarette butts from the set of Mera Lyari, she explained she had the jersey especially made because she felt like she had to send a message after being part of a project where smoking was shown on screen.

Mobeen joked that everyone on set thought it was so weird when she’d go around picking up their trash, but it turned out really well.

Art depicting conflict can mediate between our revulsion of death and our need to comprehend pathos occurring on a vast scale. Brushstrokes, like words, have agency to create a liminal space of thoughtful retreat, where horror that is too grand for emotions to process may be mitigated. Such works provide a holding space for us to recalibrate our moral and psychological compass. Quddus Mirza’s recent solo show at Canvas Gallery is a case in point.

Under the simple title ‘New Works’ are gathered nine large oil paintings and three smaller sketches. ‘New’ could equally and ironically apply to the turmoil the world has been plunged into since the razing of Gaza and the start of the Iran war.

Mirza provides a pithy artist’s statement for his work: “A perception in paint of the world in and around us.” With the two prepositions “in” and “around”, he simultaneously connects our subjective emotions (the “in”) to the global landscape (the “around”). This method of imaginative documentation is substantially different from photographic and videographic realism.

Through deceptively simple forms, Quddus Mirza’s latest work bridges the inner emotional world and the global theatre of violence

Mirza’s signature style of painting is contemporary naïve or faux naif [falsely naive]. This style deliberately chooses a child-like simplicity by eschewing refinement, three-dimensionality and classical proportionality in favour of simplified lines and flattened space. It is a style that acquires immense poignancy in the context of war, particularly the recent wars against Gaza and Iran, in which unimaginable numbers of children have been slaughtered. We enter the killing fields through saturated colour and scratchy lines that trigger emotional immediacy and intensity.

Underlying the stylistic disingenuity are complex manipulations, in which the rule of thirds is deployed by the artist to divide the picture plane, as is the use of emphatic contrast between black and white segments against fields of saturated and luminous colour. Both sky and ground are featured in the paintings, and the two realms create the narrative. The sky becomes the arena for the perpetrator to unleash terror, while the ground is the arena where the victims of downward-descending destruction face annihilation.

Airplanes, since their earliest use in 1911 for reconnaissance and subsequent aerial combat, have become a recurring feature of art about war. The British brothers Richard and Sydney Carline were the first artists to depict aerial landscapes during World War I. Airplanes feature prominently in several of Mirza’s paintings.

In A Stained Landscape, the upper one-third of the painting is dominated by a plane in black and white. The lower two-thirds of the painting is scattered with red graves on a viridian green background. A sketchy figure, unmistakably a child, lies between the graves.

The Ghost City shows an apocalyptic scene in which the accoutrements of regular life are dispersed across the canvas. This is rearrangement by bombardment. The scatter of items is unified by the underlying field of red paint.

The Book Still Burning is an enigmatic painting. The discourse turns on the mysterious identity of the book. Is the book a reference to a sacred document? Or is it a reference to the People of the Book who have conflicted with one another over centuries? The viewer can freely interpret the title, and this gives the painting many dynamic layers of meaning.

The painting Black Birds is overtly polemical. It uses the technique of collage. Images of various models of war planes are placed in the sky, while the cover of an old book is pasted between the heads of two figures. The title of the book reads “How States Are Governed.” This is sharp irony in a world in which the rules-based order has shattered.

The idea of governability connects politics and war as in the much referenced dictum by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is merely the continuation of policy (or politics) by other means [On War, 1832].”

Mirza’s perceptions align with our heartbreak and inability to prevent death and injustice. His universalised depiction of war highlights its insanity.

‘New Works’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from April 7-16, 2026

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, May 3rd, 2026

The Next Salahuddin, a children’s film about a Gazan boy who dreams of conquering Jerusalem, has been picked up by HUM TV for a future release, the channel announced on Friday. The film had a limited theatrical run earlier this year across nine Pakistani cities.

Created by Jinn TV, the film follows Yousuf, whose childhood is taken away from him by a — presumably Israeli — airstrike that kills his family members and leaves him buried under the rubble of his home.

The boy then works towards his goal of uniting Muslims around the world to avenge his people and raise the Palestinian flag over the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, shadowing the achievements of Salahuddin Ayubi — the Muslim general who captured the city during the Crusades.

The film was conceptualised by Ustadh Asim Ismail and brought to life by Farhan Siddiqui, who wrote and created it using AI. A Malaysian non-profit organisation, Cinta Gaza Malaysia, was also involved in the film’s development.

In the announcement’s comment section, the mood was less jovial than expected and people wondered if this was really the right way to go about making a film on such an important topic.

Netizens questioned if HUM TV, part of one of the largest media companies in Pakistan, lacked the resources to make a film on the Palestinian struggle without using AI.

Some users pointed out the controversies surrounding the use of AI itself, like its wasteful use of clean water and the fact it has been called out for enabling the exploitation of artists and writers.

Others made their point very clear: AI is not art. They also called on people to boycott generative AI.

HUM TV has not given a release date for the film yet and it remains to be seen how the film will be received by audiences when it does air.

While one can occasionally need social and material support from those around them, the gendered aspect of this equation is rather unsavoury, especially when the one being served is a man, and the women are the obligatory givers. Women chronically break their backs to provide for the men around them and Kafeel takes us through the tipping point of this cultural crisis.

Typically, women work overtime caring for the home, the kids and the elderly. Add a man to this mix of caregiving and homes topple. The premise of this drama is the call-out that any marriage will break apart when a man doesn’t provide financially, emotionally and psychologically.

The reason this drama is fresh is that the falling apart is not depicted as the woman’s fault, in fact, what makes Kafeel rare is that it does not even entertain the notion of whether it might be. A blameless woman is refreshingly close to the human condition and reminds me of the Haseena Moin and Noorul Huda Shah era of Pakistani dramas. It reminds me of the point Hum Gunahgar Aurtain was making when Kishwar Naheed wrote the poem about almost everything being a woman’s fault.

It takes two to bhangra

Perhaps some feminists would call this a very archaic take on gender roles — the assumption that a man brings home the nihari and the woman provides homely dhobi services — but the point I’d like to make is that men have so much privilege in society, the least they can do is the job that gains them all that privilege in the first place.

You must have heard the trite bicycle-wheel analogy — that a marriage can only work if both wheels are working. Sadly, in Pakistani contexts, this lame analogy is only used if a woman doesn’t perform her role well, hardly ever is a man held accountable for a lifetime of freeloading off women’s invisible labour.

The other injustice rests in the fact that we do need these gender norms to prevail in earnest because the economy is so archaic. Especially during child-rearing years, men need to bring in the food because women, though capable, are stretched thin. Pakistan, for all practical purposes, is stuck in a pre-industrial time — agrarian for the most part — where only 23 per cent of women enter the workforce, mainly in menial or care jobs. Only a negligible portion of women have more than a $1,000 in their bank accounts. So, there is no way that traditional gender roles don’t rule this world.

After Rafia Zakaria’s takedowns of white feminism, it becomes imperative to understand that being more modern does not necessitate being more liberated for women in this non-white context. I believe that working women in Pakistan got the short end of the stick because they entered the workforce and ended up doing three jobs for low pay. They do these three jobs — home, work and caregiving — while their spouses sometimes have merely one job, or in the case of Kafeel, no job at all.

Earning money does not always earn women dignity. In fact, they may even be looked down upon, resulting in lower status.

The value of a woman’s work

The rupee must be valued, because any disposable income a woman has in this society is going to be spent on her family. Yet, the economics of empowerment dictate that you are only as powerful as your disposable income. So, working women are no more and no less than indentured servants, blocked within the framework of the traditional wife and daughter-in-law, with only a paycheque to show for their aspirational freedom.

But aspirational freedom is not real freedom.

A paycheque earned by a middle-class woman goes mostly toward paying for the rising cost of diapers, milk, salt, school fees, bus fees and bitter gourds. There is nothing left for her own protection.

This is the world Sanam Saeed’s character Zeba inhabits as she runs on the hamster wheel of providing for her four children. And this is precisely what Kafeel understands that almost no Pakistani drama before it has bothered to — that the system failing Zeba is not abstract. It has a face. It is her husband, Jami’s face.

The drama does not examine the economy nor the patriarchy — it locates the rot in one man’s refusal to be accountable, and it does not flinch from that.

Until Kafeel came along, no one tackled the anthropological disaster that is the modern Pakistani working woman stuck with a man who loves glory more than his children. No one depicted, with all its ugliness, how gross it is to see a mother burn the candle at both ends. No one had chronicled how unsavoury it is when a perfectly intelligent woman abandons herself for the sake of societal acceptance.

A believable drama with extraordinary performances

Saeed has been a spectacular show of force in her performance especially for the believability with which she dramatises the mayhem of walking the world of marriage alone, with only responsibility as her life force. Her performance has been on point.

No one says she should not be Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill with her mere nail. We women have been doing the boulder-pushing for eons, proving that if only we gave a few more drops of blood to domesticity, the bicycle would be a bicycle. But sometimes a spanner is just a spanner. Relationships are saved by more than one person.

You strip a woman of all power, yet when it comes to saving the home, she is paradoxically held as the most powerful. Women stay in such situations predominantly due to a poverty of time — time to think, plan and strategise an exit.

When a woman is exhausted, no one is surprised. It is the most normal thing for a star-crossed woman to chaotically run from one end to another, doing something lifesaving.

But seeing a woman in control, poised, with enough money to throw at several problems until she has no problem left, is a sight no one has seen. I am willing to bet our mothers’ generation has never been caught enjoying their lives, merely chilling out. Yet what is it that we see men doing? Their life is a proverbial golf course, a proverbial charpoy, a proverbial pulpit, a proverbial couch or keyboard.

The contrast is so stark between Zeba, and Jami, that you want to reach out across the screen and shake him out of his moronic life goals — which include eating chicken patties, cribbing and complaining, and insisting that Zeba has raised the kids ‘wrong’.

The fact that he is painfully good looking is not helpful at all. But then again, most narcissists are. If they aren’t, they have so much charm that they make up for it. Highly toxic and severely emotionally challenged, Jami’s character is loathsome without being melodramatic. An evil character portrayed especially well. 

Come back in a coffin and other wedding gifts

Zeba and Jami are a household phenomenon.

The girl is wed, she is told to never return to her family home except in a coffin. Soon after, tiny pieces of her are shipped back to what was once her home in tinier coffins. In return, she receives handouts from her family, because the man she married refused to get a job, insisting that he came from privilege and maintaining a false sense of aristocracy.

Typically, what happens in a Zeba-Jami mess is that society looks the other way forever. Jami would refuse to be held accountable, and get more set in his ways. Zeba would decide to redouble her efforts, assuming she needed to prove herself. Typically, it is always a win-win for Jami.

Instead, Kafeel refuses to be a ‘typical’ drama. It does not deal in the usual Pakistani drama bargain where the woman’s suffering is redeemed by her patience. It demands that the man answer for himself. In Pakistani television, that is close to revolutionary.

Kafeel is a spiritual drama. It insists that there is more to marriage than a transfer of power. It insists, in the form of Zeba’s wizened father, that a marriage is a contract. One party not pulling their weight in life will cause a fissure, then a gaping hole, and eventually there will be a legal breach of contract. No matter how much one acts like Zeba.

I know no elder who has been that wise.

Elders become wise like this after the woman leaves, not before she leaves and certainly not during. Elders these days are all about the convenience of optics — how it looks to everyone. Elders are — and almost always have been — addicted to a woman who is muzzled or silenced at all costs and makes very little fuss.

Elders insist that once a mistake has been made and a match is not a good fit, that the mistake must be converted into a life sentence. Some call it sabar-shukar. Kafeel calls it peace at the cost of justice.

Zeba’s father is the real hero

In the drama, there is such immense clarity from Zeba’s father when he says that the role of the man is to instil peace with justice. It may be a role for a woman too, but first, a man must be a protector. With the GDP per capita ratio being what it is in Pakistan, it is important that that provision means money.

Zeba’s father does not shy away from talking money.

Often, when the broader relative cabal wants the woman to not make a peep, they usually do so because they are uncomfortable about speaking about the role money has in the breakdown of a marriage. But money is ubiquitous. Money is everything. It is hair on a good hair day, it is a breeze after a 10k hike, it is a shawl at the beginning of winter, and it certainly pays those relative’s food bills.

Yet, there is so much aversion to honest money-talk. There is so much distaste for talking about this one thing that fuels your life.

Jami can’t work, won’t work

Jami is a sick man. My thesis is that men who are kept, and then willingly stay within the confines of false status are removed from the blessings of good old fashioned hard work. They find hustle beneath their glory and would rather the women slog at work just like they do at home.

The truth of the economy evades them and the truth of the household economy definitely evades them. They have no clue what proportion and measure go into running a household — the cost of the UPS, plumbing repairs and the rising price of LNG and gasoline, or even the mounting health costs of a dysfunctional household.

Pakistan makes no sense sometimes, making weddings a million-dollar industry but making marriages a woman-only problem. Zeba is a special breed because she thinks: no, thank you.

There is always a point in a woman’s life where something gives way. For Zeba, it was getting shoved against the wall and having her mouth twisted. She spoke up with that same mouth when she asked for her right to a safe environment.

Every time a woman snaps in two, an angel somewhere sings.

The Jamis of the world are just people, not deities we are made to worship and bow down to thanks to male privilege. Male privilege in moderate quantities is a slow poison for women, but in excess, it snaps a woman in two.

Kafeel beautifully portrays how this poison can become an impetus through which a woman can rise from the ashes. But first, she has to use her feet.

The seasoned drama reviewer was on the show Kya Drama Hai when host Mukarram Kaleem called for a discussion on the show’s last episode and asked what the panelists — Odho, Marina Khan and Nadia Khan — thought of the drama.

Odho said she could tell where the story was going from the get go. “I felt that there was a very predictable story, but told well.”

She told Kaleem it was rare to see a story where you couldn’t tell what was going to happen, especially in Pakistan. She said there were shows that left audiences guessing at every twist and turn, like White Lotus, which she had started recently, but this was hard to come by.

She praised Kafeel for its positive ending and how the show tied everything together. She was also happy with the messaging the show had for audiences, like how Warda ends up finding her place with her in-laws.

The actor said she also loved the way they had depicted the bond between a mother and her son through Subuk and Zeba. “They’ve shown such a strong mother-son bond, which is accurate too. Boys are always, always on their mother’s side, I can tell you this from experience.”

She said that, in her experience daughters will pick a fight with their mums, but her son has supported her in everything she’s ever done. “I know that boys are very soft with their mothers and here, I liked seeing the mother-son dynamic. I loved seeing that the mother who went through such abuse and deprivation, all her children collectively thought to give her a second chance at happiness. They looked at her as a human being, not just as a woman or a mother.”

Later in the show, Odho revealed her affinity for the mother-son dynamic was because she had “lived this experience” herself. She recalled a time when, after her divorce, her son came to her and suggested she get married to her now-husband, Samar Ali Khan.

“It was my son who came to me and said I should get married for a third time. That’s not something you do lightly, a third marriage, even my mother wasn’t on board, saying people will make jokes.”

She said she was also initially hesitant because she anticipated resistance from her daughters. When she told her son about that, he assured her he would convince his sisters personally.

The 49-year-old posted a video ‌on Instagram on Thursday from Brazil’s Maracana stadium to tease the track, which features Nigerian singer ​Burna Boy. The song will be ​released on May 14.

In the footage, the ⁠singer appears alongside a group of ​dancers dressed in the colours of several ​of the national teams taking part in the tournament, which will be held from June 11 to ​July 19 in Mexico, the United States ​and Canada.

The video also features the official match balls ‌from ⁠the 2006, 2010 and 2014 World Cups, apparently referencing the tournaments in which Shakira played a prominent role musically.

The Latin pop ​star had ​also performed ⁠the official song for the 2010 World Cup in South ​Africa — ‘Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)’.

She ​performed ⁠her hit ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ and ‘La La La’ during ceremonies at the 2006 ⁠World ​Cup in Germany and ​the 2014 tournament in Brazil respectively.

A spokesperson for the singer said she had been “put into an induced coma by her doctors to aid her recovery”.

He acknowledged that Tyler’s fans were wishing her well and asked for “privacy at this difficult time” on her behalf. He said her team will “issue a further statement when we are able to”.

Earlier, a post on her official Instagram page said the singer was “recuperating” after emergency intestinal surgery.

The 74-year-old star, best known for her 1983 mega-hit ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, was operated on at a hospital in Faro in southern Portugal, the post said.

Tyler shot to fame in the 1970s with hits including ‘Lost in France’ and ‘It’s a Heartache’. ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ later topped the charts in both Britain and the United States.

“We are very sorry to announce that Bonnie has been admitted to hospital in Faro, Portugal, where she has a home, for emergency intestinal surgery,” the Instagram post on Wednesday said.

“The surgery went well and she is now recuperating,” it added.

The Grammy-nominated singer, who was born Gaynor Hopkins, is due to tour Europe later this year to mark 50 years since the release of ‘Lost in France’ which was her breakthrough hit in 1976.

Other hits include ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ in 1984 which featured on the soundtrack to the huge US box office success Footloose.

In 2013, Tyler represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden, with the song ‘Believe In Me’, finishing in 19th place.

She was recognised in 2022 by the late Queen Elizabeth II, who before her death awarded her an honour for her five-decade-long music career.

Cover photo: AFP

But these descriptions, one feels, do not do justice to the way the narrative challenged troubling, deep-rooted societal norms and upended notions of honour in 27 riveting episodes.

Mirror to society

If Aik Aur Pakeezah can be likened to the metaphorical ‘mirror to society’, then the image it reflects is a multi-layered one, shrouded in colours that are gloomy, with some spurts of brightness.

Peer deeper into the reflection, and you see shadows that conceal secrets; bright nooks that look appealing from afar but have deep cracks running through them; dark, painful corners; and then, in the far distance, a ray of light for those who choose to fight for what is right.

In a fleeting glance, you could say that the drama exposes the debilitating consequences of cybercrime and society’s inclination to victim-blame. But delve deeper into the story’s architecture, and you find so many more points of conversation, so many norms being challenged, and so much that is disturbing and yet entirely relatable.

Extremely nuanced, tightly woven and intensely thought-provoking, yet widely entertaining, the recently concluded drama serial Aik Aur Pakeezah managed to get some very pertinent messages about cybercrime and the victimisation of women across to audiences

Masterfully written by Bee Gul and directed by Kashif Nisar, this isn’t just an ordinary drama with a linear story that culminates in a happy, romantic ending. The plot weaves through different tracks, designed to make the audience think, to fall in love with the characters and empathise with them.

The story swings between Pakeezah (Sehar Khan) and Faraz (Nameer Khan) — whose lives fall to pieces when they are filmed at gunpoint and then their video is released on the internet — to the home of Mummy (Hina Bayat), who is caustic but well-meaning and has a mysterious, murky past, and the lives of Saman (Amna Ilyas) and Zubair (Gohar Rasheed), two newlywed lawyers confronted by a moral dilemma.

Other pivotal characters take their places, like the perfectly fitting pieces of a puzzle: the family, grappling with their sanity now that their ‘honour’ has been sullied; the village woman who lost her youth and her wealth to the family of her deceased husband; the criminal, bolstered by his ego and a twisted sense of morality; and members of the legal system, varying from those who encourage fighting against injustice to others who cringe at the shame attached to the crime.

Bee Gul on emotional exhaustion

I ask Bee Gul, who can be credited for writing some of Pakistan’s finest TV drama scripts over the years, if this is the best script that she has written? She laughs.

“The finest is yet to come!” she says. “I can’t really look at my scripts from that perspective, because I get so engrossed in the world that I have created that I am unable to distance myself and look at the story from an objective point of view.

“Writing Aik Aur Pakeezah was emotionally exhausting and painful and, in my mind, all that was unfolding on paper was real. It was after I wrote it, when I would read out scenes to the director or the cast, that my ears would process the scenes and there were times when I would break down.”

Time and again, dialogues tug at the heart. The titular Pakeezah, tearfully taunts Faraz, highlighting how men are forgiven by their families and not blamed, while women are deserted completely: “Tu apne baap ke saath shaljam gosht kha sakta hai, jo teri maan ne pakaya hai. Main apnay ghar mein tau kya apni gali mein bhi paer nahin rakh sakti [While you’re free to enjoy a meal with your father that your mother has cooked, I’m not even allowed to set foot in my street, let alone my home].”

At another point, Pakeezah’s tone-deaf mother reasons that it was because her daughter had been overdressed and had slapped a man in her neighbourhood when he had tried to grab her hand, that that man took revenge on her with a viral digital video: “Aurat zaat ko dheema ho ke, neecha ho ke chalna hota hai gali mein… jawan larrka hai… machine thorri hai… larrkay se ho jati hain aisi ghalatiyaan jawani mein…. [Women should walk softly and shrink themselves while walking in the street… he is a hot-blooded youth… not a machine… young men do make such mistakes in their youth].”

In the final, groundbreaking episode, Mummy makes an observation when the women in the family of a newborn girl, whose mother had been murdered, refuse to adopt her because she is ‘larrki zaat’ [female]:“Abhi jayega na ghar, tau bitha kar maan, taayi, chaachi ko poochhna woh kaun zaat hain? [When you go home, make your mother and aunts sit down and explain to you what gender they belong to].”

Writing Aik Aur Pakeezah was emotionally exhausting and painful and, in my mind, all that was unfolding on paper was real. It was after I wrote it, when I would read out scenes to the director or the cast, that my ears would process the scenes and there were times when I would break down,” says writer Bee Gul

There are the conversations in Pakeezah’s home, where her elder brother, Akbar (Umer Darr), who once doted on her, wishes that she were dead now that she has stained the family’s honour. In one unnerving episode, he gets so enraged that he tries to kill Pakeezah. Then there are her parents, who initially abandoned their daughter, blaming her for bringing shame to the family, and later become her staunch supporters.

And then there is Faraz, Pakeezah’s husband, who stands by her side even when she recoils from him, standing his ground when his family tells him to leave her, disturbed by the scandal but insistent that the two of them would be able to weather the storm together.

There is, of course, the contradiction lying within Pakeezah’s name itself. The Urdu word implies ‘purity’ and yet, Pakeezah, a young girl with dreams and ambitions, is labelled ‘impure’ because of someone’s heartless crime.

Pakeezah and Faraz

The performances are uniformly brilliant but, of course, the ones that really stand out are the leads.

“I didn’t premeditate my role,” says Sehar Khan, who proved her mettle as one of the country’s finest young actresses with her enactment of Pakeezah. “I just thought, how would I have reacted if this had happened to me? And this is how I performed every scene. The pain on screen was my own pain and I hope that people have seen the drama as if it is their own pain.”

What was the most painful scene for her to enact?

“There were so many,” she says. “One of them was when Pakeezah finds Saman, the lawyer who finally helps her out. This is the first time that she feels that there is someone who can help get her justice, and understands how she has been violated. For the first time, she breaks down, and I was actually crying uncontrollably in that scene.

“And then the scene in the final episode, where Pakeezah’s mother, in her own way, tells her that it would be an injustice if she forgave her brother, who had tried to murder her. It was a very nuanced, emotional moment.”

Sehar continues: “I actually had to take some time off after playing Pakeezah because the character had drained me emotionally. My main reason for signing on to the drama was that the script had been written by Bee Gul, and Kashif Nisar was directing it. It was only after working in the drama that I could see why Kashif Nisar is respected the way he is.”

For actor Nameer Khan, the drama marks his first time as a male lead.

“I learnt a lot and improved immensely as an actor,” he says. “For me, the biggest challenge was that Faraz’s family was not shown on screen, and yet he would talk about them constantly.

“I had to believably depict Faraz’s struggles and the pain inflicted upon him by the people around him, without the audience being able to see these people physically. I think, to some extent, I was able to do this.”

Kashif Nisar on directing discomfort

Director Kashif Nisar observes that he had come across such an intelligent script after a long time. “It was very contemporary, very current, very grounded in reality. Bee Gul is an amazing writer.”

Is it relatively tricky tackling a drama centred around certain issues?

“Yes, it is tricky,” says the director. “If four people sitting in a lounge are watching the drama and even two of them begin to get uncomfortable, they are likely to switch the channel and just watch something where pleasant music is playing. It is difficult to grip the audience with a hard watch, but we have tried.”

Aik Aur Pakeezah’s beginning is particularly harrowing, giving glimpses of how a terror-struck Pakeezah and Faraz are held at gunpoint while they are filmed.

“The incident that took place was not our topic — it was what happened before and after the incident,” explains Kashif. “We did not want to deliver breaking news. We were not glamorising or sensationalising the incident. It is a story about ordinary people, a boy- and a girl-next-door you can relate to. I give credit to Bee Gul for writing the story this way. It is brilliant.”

There are certain lead actors and actresses one usually associates with Kashif Nisar but, in Aik Aur Pakeezah, he opted to work with Sehar Khan and Nameer Khan for the first time. Why?

“Bee Gul, myself and Roshaneh Zafar, founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, collectively decided on the cast,” he says. “I am glad that I worked with these two new actors. They have refreshing perspectives on their roles and they surprised me with some truly outstanding work.”

Aik Aur Pakeezah’s entire cast, in fact, is in a league of its own. The ensemble also includes Noor ul Hassan, Nadia Afgan, Saqib Sameer, Ali Jan, Ali Aftab Saeed, Davar Mahfooz and Namra Shahid, who mastered the Seraiki language in order to slip into the skin of the village-dwelling Noor Bhari.

‘Mummy’ as a moral compass

Hina Khawaja Bayat, as the incisive Mummy, was the moral compass of the drama.

“She was definitely one of the best characters that I have played,” says Hina. “Bee Gul had thought out the layers of the character so well, and while she was no one’s biological mother, she acted as a maternal figure to so many. She was the writer’s voice, a voice of reason, making comments that would nudge people around her in a particular direction, and make them think about what to do.”

She continues: “Through her own experiences, Mummy was able to relate with and give valuable advice to the women around them. From her stepdaughter becoming a second wife, to Noor Bhari getting abandoned, and Pakeezah getting rejected by her family, Mummy could connect it all with painful episodes of her own life.”

“The power of drama is extensive in Pakistan,” says Kashif Nisar. “If dramas can influence people into changing their wardrobes and styling their hair a certain way, then why not introduce a topic to them as well?”

Making messaging watchable

For Kashf Foundation’s Roshaneh Zafar, the drama has managed to get some very pertinent messages across to a mass audience.

“Hopefully, we have managed to start off multiple conversations,” she says. “Firstly, the drama focuses on victim-blaming, where a certain morality is enforced on a victim and the public becomes judge and jury. And if it is a woman, instead of commiserating with her, the first few questions that people ask are, why did she go there in the first place, or why was she wearing what she was wearing?

“Then, we wanted to raise awareness regarding cybercrime and depict how society looks differently at male and female victims. We wanted the audience to gain more knowledge on what the law says about different issues, such as honour killings, violence against women, divorce and second marriages.”

She adds: “As an organisation committed to women’s empowerment, we want to highlight the importance of having access to justice. At one particular point, Barrister Saman says that, while there are laws to protect women, they are often not implemented because women don’t speak out, silenced by their families or because they associate the crime with shame.”

The Kashf Foundation has now delved into using television dramas to communicate its messages a number of times. Roshaneh explains the process Kashf Foundation adopts in such projects.

“When developing a drama, we always pay very close attention to the script. We work with actual victims and we refer to their real-life stories when we are coming up with concepts for dramas. Once the script is finalised, 80 percent of our work is done.

“Bee Gul, Kashif Nisar and I worked for a long period, just developing the story, and still, when I saw it on screen, even knowing what was going to happen next, the scenes wrung my heart. This drama really turned out to be very special and I feel a sense of internal competition: how are we going to do better than Aik Aur Pakeezah with our next drama?”

Now that, truly, is a challenge. A drama so nuanced, so well-knit, so thought-provoking and yet, in its own way, entertaining, is hard to come by.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, May 3rd, 2026

Actors and models tasked their good friend Chat GPT to get them ready for the biggest night in global fashion and the results were… something.

Azfar Rehman — The one who followed the dress code

Let’s start with one of the better ones. Azfar Rehman’s “Met Gala look” was a suit and cape inspired by Barcelona’s iconic La Pedrera — a heritage building from the early 20th-century designed by Antoni Gaudi. It was perhaps the only look that kept to the Gala’s theme of ‘Fashion is Art’.

On the flip side, Mehwish Hayat called the outfit “very holesome” and we’re kinda mad we didn’t come up with that one.

Tooba Siddiqui — Mad Max: GT Road

Tooba Siddiqui kept things desi and likely used “goth truck art” — three words that have probably never been uttered together before –– in the prompt she used for her dress.

What came out can only be described as “truck art if the truck driver was also a pirate”. There’s very little colour, there are skulls, everything is black. It looks like something a toxic ex would wear to your wedding.

Srha Asgr — Fashion is the art gallery

In a leap of logic only AI is capable of, Srha Asgr’s look said, “Fashion is art, art is found in galleries, therefore fashion is the gallery.”

Her gown was covered from neck to toe in — empty — picture frames, making us wonder whether she was sending a message about the new-age obsession with everything picture-perfect, or if she just called it a day after a couple of messages with her chatbot.

Hina Altaf — Dressed for the wrong year

Hina Altaf had her look generated for a Met Gala, just not the one in 2026. Her look, a form-fitting tunic with a mandarin collar and gold embroidery would have worked for past events which focused on history — maybe 1979, when the theme was the Hapsburg-era fashion.

Still, if she’d get something similar made by real people and wear it to a real event, we think it could work.

Ahmed Ali Butt — Solar Superman

Okay, Ahmed Ali Butt’s creation was definitely unfit for this year’s Met Gala. He knows it, we know it, everyone knows it.

Still, the actor did send a message about renewable energy with the wings embedded with solar panels and a gas cylinder with “no gas” printed on it. We’re not sure we get the Jordans though.

Jokes aside, it’s odd to see so many artists resort to AI for costume inspiration at a time when Pakistani fashion can be said to be experiencing a golden age both at home and abroad.

Pakistan’s art scene would perhaps be better served if these celebrities worked with their friends and colleagues in the fashion industry to host an actual themed gala to benefit our own museums.

When the world is turning to Pakistani brands like Warp and Rastah for fashion, why are our own celebrities going to half-baked robots to dress them up anyway?

The model posted a video message on Wednesday reacting to the arrest of classical dancer and activist Sheema Kermani and other organisers of the Aurat March on Tuesday.

“I woke up today to the disgusting, disturbing news that Aurat March has yet to receive their NOC [no-objection certificate] for their peaceful march on May 10. They were fighting for the NOC, but women were dragged… by other women. I think it’s a very very shameful act that we don’t respect our women in our country,” she said in the first of three clips posted to her Instagram account.

Robin, who had shared a reel showing Kermani being manhandled and pushed into a car by the police, said she was appalled at the comments under the post. “Forget men, women are so happy and I am sure these are the same women who get beaten and abused by their fathers and brothers and they continue to adjust and live with them,” she said.

“It’s a really, really shameful act that we can’t breathe freely in our country, we can’t speak freely. If we speak about marital rape, harassment, equal rights, [our speaking up] becomes the biggest issue in the country,” she said in the second clip.

She urged everyone in Karachi who was able to join the march to go and show solidarity on Sunday. For those who couldn’t and those who were afraid to join — something that “totally makes sense because of the current situation” — she said the least they could do was talk about the cause and post about it on social media.

“Staying silent hasn’t really gotten us anywhere, nor will it,” the model said.

In another appeal to “influential” men and women on her story, Robin asked them to “take a moment to acknowledge the women being arrested for peacefully marching for equal rights” amid all the hype around fashion and the Met Gala.

She said spreading the much-needed awareness cost nothing, reminding them that “fashion, glamour and social responsibility can coexist”.

The term ‘katabasis’ literally means a journey to the underworld, whereby a living individual heroically goes all the way to the kingdom of the dead for a specific purpose. In classical mythology, some of the most famous examples of such heroes are Orpheus and Aeneas.

The novel, which is a work of fantasy set in the realm of an alternative reality, begins by noting that the protagonist Alice Law’s Cambridge adviser Jacob Grimes has been blown up due to a magical experiment that went horribly wrong. So devastating was the death that his eviscerated body and mutilated remains could only be collected in a bucket by the university’s janitorial scouts! Since Grimes was, unquestionably, one of the top names in Cambridge’s Department of Analytic Magick, Alice is dismayed at the prospect of having to shift to an inferior academic adviser, who will not be able to provide the references and connections that Grimes could have.

Unquestionably brilliant herself and undeniably driven, Alice sketches a complex pentagram and prepares to sojourn to the underworld, armed with a Perpetual Flask (of enchanted drinking water that never runs out) and Lembas Bread (highly enriched protein bars ideal for such macabre camping trips). Much to her dismay, another highly talented advisee of Grimes’, Peter Murdoch (originally educated at Oxford), shows up and insists on accompanying her to hell.

After an academic adviser is blown up in a magical experiment, two of his students make a perilous journey to the underworld to rescue him in this fantasy novel.

Kuang’s version of the underworld is a combination of that alluded to in Dante’s Inferno and Chinese mythology (one of its major deities is the grim god Yama or Yanluo Wang). She keeps her landscape logical and relatively simple. Alice and Peter are expected to proceed through seven levels of the underworld, namely Pride, Desire, Greed, Wrath, Violence, Cruelty and Tyranny, before ending up at the Eighth Court and pleading with Yama to return Dr Grimes to the land of the living. They have to be careful to avoid the waters of Lethe (which in Greek mythology was the river of forgetfulness) since the river has the ability to obliterate memories, purpose and consciousness.

Although they respect each other as academics, Alice and Peter squabble a great deal along the way about sundry topics, ranging from conundrums of logic to complex mathematical paradoxes. Their innate humanity and engaging interactions undeniably count as the best part of the book. Both ranked among Grimes’ best students, but he was a nasty and phenomenally egotistical man who subjected them to a great deal of emotional abuse and mental cruelty. Their intrepid journey ultimately ends up being less about retrieving Grimes and more about wrestling with their internal demons, which are symbolic of his unhealthy hold over them both.

Kuang does a wonderful job of depicting the power struggles that constitute the dark heart of academic life. Some of the major characters whom Peter and Alice encounter are the souls (referred to in the book as ‘Shades’ per classical tradition) of intellectually gifted individuals who killed themselves because they were unable to cope with the obscene pressures, jealousies and rivalries of the world’s highest ranking and most illustrious academic institutions.

For instance, a former advisee of Grimes named Elspeth, could have had a very fine career had she not been irreparably damaged on the psychological level by the cruelty of her adviser. Fundamentally a decent woman, albeit batty and eccentric, Elspeth proves instrumental in helping Alice reach Yama.

“She was deep in Cruelty. At some point in the night she had made the crossing; perhaps the Escher trap had been at the border of Violence and Cruelty all along. The change was a difference not in kind, but in degree. Both were desert planes, but where Violence was harsh and mindless, Cruelty was littered with intention. Cruelty f****d with you on purpose. She kept coming across mysterious structures — interlacing bone, precipitously balanced, arranged occasionally like abstract art. Shapes carved out on the sand. Footsteps, maybe human, dancing in patterns she couldn’t make sense of.” — Excerpt from the book

One of the most memorable characters in the novel is Archimedes, a Cambridge cat who can bridge the gulf between the world of the living and that of the dead. His sense of morality is more honourable than that of most of the human figures in the novel, including its protagonists. Neither Alice nor Peter, however, are as sadistic and demented as the Kripke trio, a pair of dark magicians and their son who prey on the more helpless beings in the underworld.

As it progresses, the book begins to display darker undertones. Much to their horror, Peter and Alice discover that it was due to their own errors that Grimes’ magical pentagram had ended up killing him. Any reader will ask himself or herself why Grimes didn’t notice a rookie mistake in the spell he was casting.

In order to appreciate this point, one needs to keep in mind that major academics tend to be notoriously careless about looking over academic minutiae. On a personal level, I was rather amused once, when I was working at the American University in Cairo, to find that an Egyptian secretary had changed the spelling of ‘Jane Austen’ in one of my missives to ‘Jane Austin’ and felt she had done me a great favour! Had I not been in the habit of meticulously checking drafts of my writing, I would not have noticed this and, while the error wouldn’t have got me killed, it would have made me a laughing-stock in certain circles.

Perhaps Kuang would have benefitted from keeping the novel shorter. There is an uneven nature to the work that might have been more excusable were she a less experienced novelist. For instance, the almost obsessive focus on conundrums of logic and magical pentagrams begins to grate on the nerves halfway through the book and, while the earlier levels of Hell such as Pride and Desire are painstakingly described, Tyranny barely makes a blip on the plot’s radar.

Alice, who appears to be an alter ego of Kuang herself (both are Westernised but have Chinese origins), is earnest and dedicated but also rather self-indulgent. After a while, Kuang seems less interested in refining a good adventure story and more invested in getting us to sympathise with how much Alice has been through.

Given that the author holds academic degrees from Georgetown, Oxford and Cambridge and is currently at Yale, perhaps one can understand that her creative vision is somewhat shackled by her personal academic experiences. However, the best and most visionary novels of the fantasy genre are never self-indulgent. Had that been the case with Frank Herbert’s Dune, it would never have won the Hugo and the Nebula awards.

I disagree with Olivie Blake’s marketing blurb that states Katabasis is destined to be a modern classic. Something that reads like a young-adult novel masquerading as a book for older adults, and which is part JK Rowling and part Dorothy Sayers in terms of literary flavour, requires more than good marketing in order to withstand the test of time. Depicting the heroine feeding desperately on a hapless cat’s viscera does not connote genius, and it takes a clear-headed mind to point out that, in this novel’s case, the emperor, while not precisely naked, is hardly looking resplendent.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that the book is entertaining, well-written, worth a read if one has time to spare, and helps to underscore that one doesn’t need to be white in order to be taken seriously by those who are. Katabasis’ implicit agenda, therefore, is political not literary. But given the freedom that creativity confers on all authors, great or small, Kuang need hardly be faulted for this.

Originally published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 3rd, 2026

The movie starts off with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who is finally the investigative journalist she dreamed of becoming. She’s about to accept a journalism award when she, along with her entire team, gets fired. Andy proceeds to deliver a speech about the importance of journalism and how the story matters more than the money.

Her speech is a testament to the current state of the media. It’s no longer the over-beautified and glorified early 2000s. Rom-coms from that era sold us a false dream of girlhood and making it as a successful writer. It was simply a tried-and-tested trope that worked at the time.

With the new movie, it’s clear that the trope looks quite different now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 was, on a whole, good. It was fun, nostalgic and exciting to revisit characters and spaces we cherished years ago. Meryl Streep stuns, as always, as Miranda Priestly, although I do think her character was much softer in this film and that she initially seemed to accept her fate in the downfall of Runway.

Stanley Tucci as Nigel is as witty and classy as ever. The movie touched upon the fashion, the conglomerates and the chaos of the industry but still somehow fell short because a sequel is never as good as the original. The plot looks different now and I think the best thing the movie did was comment on the dying media landscape. It hit all the right notes with the fashion, the art, the office space and the cameos, although the score could have been better.

Storytellers versus systems

Whether it was Runway, Poise Magazine (13 Going on 30), Composure (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or Scarlet (The Bold Type), the early 2000s emerged as the girl boss, glossy magazine era. Today, the media industry (even in rom-coms) looks different.

The Devil Wears Prada built a brand that relied on the expression of bold fashion and luxury, as well as the rise of print media. But now, with part two, there are some realities fiction cannot hide from. Print media has died, leaving editors to create reels and polls, and writers to rely on clicks for their voices to mean something.

In the film, Runway has been digitised and the people behind the magazine are scrambling to hold it together. Finance bros like BJ Novak are now making big decisions for things they don’t know anything about. As Miranda asked in one of my favourite scenes from the movie, what about artistry?

The value society places on storytelling and good journalism has been dying for a while, but beyond that, the movie shows how power has shifted. Even Miranda, someone who has been in the field for years, has a lingering fear of being let go. And that is a clear reflection of the industry today. The stakeholders are different now and the power no longer lies with cultural producers — it lies with corporations.

As Kriti Gupta writes for Refinery29, “The ‘devil’ isn’t Miranda Priestly. It’s the room she’s standing in.”

We ask ourselves now, 20 years after the release of The Devil Wears Prada, how does the world look different? In an age of AI, clickbait journalism, doomscrolling and bed-rotting, people are not reading enough. Listicles rake in the numbers and long-form pieces are left in the dust.

When Andy publishes her first piece as features editor of Runway, she gets some solid feedback from others but Miranda asks a pressing question: “But did people read it?” And that was, in fact, what mattered to her. Even a journalist like Andy, who initially wanted to chase the great American story, began spending her time analysing metrics.

The collapse of feminist media spaces

So many women-run media companies have shut down over the past three years — Gal-dem, Bitch Media, Self Magazine. Refinery29 has been downsizing. Teen Vogue no longer exists. There’s a clear pattern here — feminist publications have been shutting down and shrinking and I don’t think it’s because people don’t read them.

In the age of AI and the finance bro, there seems to be a lack of value people place on publications like these, leading to a loss of independent female voices. I worked at an all-women-run digital media company for years and we housed voices from across the globe, told stories that mattered, but we shut down too. It isn’t that the media industry is dying — it’s that there has been a global shift from community-run spaces to corporate control.

An entire ecosystem is burning to the ground, and we can’t do anything about it because of ‘evolution’ and the patriarchy and the loss of individualism in this age.

The advertising economy

Magazines used to be filled with pages of luxury ads. Advertisers relied heavily on these publications to get word of their products out there. Brands now no longer need to rely on a “middleman” — they run their own ads on social media. Now, we rely on algorithms and there is no longer someone filtering the content we receive. The audience, the readers, never went anywhere, but the power has definitely shifted.

Journalist Harry Cheadle writes, “Digital media companies were attracting their audiences in large part through social media apps and search engines — that audience wasn’t ‘ours’ in any meaningful sense. These platforms gradually realised they wanted to keep people on Instagram or Facebook or the Google results page rather than sending the traffic to publishers.”

In the age of Substack, where Cheadle wrote his essay on the death of the digital media, writers are seeking out spaces to actively put their work out there. Some of that work may have initially existed within publications that have now shut down.

People are still searching for that community that was once created through this fantasy of magazines. But community looks different now. And while the end of The Devil Wears Prada 2 gave us hope, with Miranda still helming Runway, the message about the transformation of the media industry is clear.

The movie isn’t a serious retelling of the industry nor is it supposed to be. It’s just a reminder that we are now living in a solo creator economy. Every industry is shaped by the new generation and maybe it’s time to let go of the fantasy and ground ourselves in reality.

The media industry isn’t really dying, it’s just restructuring.